I started in a human village near to my recently abandoned fort, hoping to visit it now that it had fallen to the depredations of the chasm life. I remembered the tale of Sankis II returning to the grave of his father in Boatmurdered.
The first thing I saw was that the floor was littered with random trash that I had traded to the town. I picked up some masterful stone mugs (I recognized the name of the maker as my late mayor) and bought some leather armor, then spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out how to change my shirt.
I then tried to hire everyone I met. The first person who joined me was a random pikeman but the second was the markswoman whose slaying of a dragon had ended worldgen and 100 years of dragon raids on her village.
We wandered through the wilderness in the general direction of my fort, killing sundry cougars and wolves (I mostly hung back while my companions attacked), and finally ended up at my old fort.
I was immediately greeted by spam that dwarven merchants and guards were being mauled by naked mole dogs. (A caravan had been waiting in the depot as the monsters devoured my mayor and caused my fort to descend into tantrum spiral.)
I couldn't find the main entrance, but I found a hole leading to my sunken farm for sunberries. I jumped in, getting stunned as I landed on the bottom. My companions didn't follow me down, so I wandered forward into the darkness, gradually remembering the layout of my fort.
I passed some armor bins left unmoved by the fortress's fall, and swapped off my crappy gear for some superior and exceptional steel plate. The food and drink barrels were scattered everywhere, and the food inside was not yet rotting, so I stuck some into my backpack.
By this time, my companions had reappeared; clearly they had found the main entrance unguarded by animals. The message spam was getting worse: a hammerdwarf had joined the fight and was actually injuring the animals. Every few steps, the screen filled up with large rats and antmen passing out from pain. The rough stone path from my farms to my fort complex and the chasm was long, straight, and bare; thanks to the spam it took us nearly half an hour.
At last, we came to the top level of the crypts. An up/down stair led both up to the main halls, where the residential, industrial, and dining districts were located, and down to the lower crypts, which linked up with the fatal chasm. In the distance, we could hear that the hammerdwarf was overexerted, but due to his armor the rats were barely damaging him. We unanimously decided to plumb the lower depths in search of him.
Our first sight in the lower crypts was of the aftermath of a great struggle. The red and tan corpses of antmen, naked mole dogs, and troglodytes littered the floor. The walls and stairs were stained with copious amounts of blood. A dwarven merchant lay dismembered near the grave of a pet cat that had come with the first migrant wave; a marksdwarf had made her last stand in the doorway of my sheriff's tomb, surrounded by spent bolts and the rats she had managed to dispatch.
The sounds in the distance were not auspicious; the rats were now consistently injuring the dwarf, who had become nauseous. We cautiously passed through the empty halls, occasionally catching sight of a pile of corpses where someone had died fighting. Memories returned of my fateful order that the last ten dwarves charge into the depths; most of them no doubt rested at the bottoms of several of these piles.
Before we found the second set of stairs going down, we heard a message that the surviving hammerdwarf had finally been struck down. We pressed on anyway, coming to the place where he had died fighting. The corpses of nearly two dozen fell beasts lay around him. At last we caught sight of enemies: a pair of badly injured antmen, whom we easily slew, mildly alleviating the message spam. From the hammerdwarf's dead fingers I took his steel weapon, vowing to avenge him, and prepared myself. Further beyond the fallen hammerdwarf lay the hole in the wall where I had broken into the abyss.
We passed through, and emerged into a smooth and carved hall. I expected that at the far end, a gate would open onto a bridge that I would cross to face the trolls, and finally the terrible named spider that had brought down my fort.
We did not expect to be met by a wave of dozens of naked mole dogs, followed by ratmen, troglodytes, and other stuff the game had decided to spawn inside the room. There were too many of them; even though we fought hard, the markswoman was out of ammunition and the pikeman lost his weapon in an antman. Eventually, the markswoman had her throat torn out, the pikeman bled to death, and all I could do was flail away until...
...You have been struck down
Author
Topic: Your First Adventure (Read 1671 times)